


Sometimes the Fall Kills You

by mandalbrot



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 05:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandalbrot/pseuds/mandalbrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gendry dreams of a lost wolf girl</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes the Fall Kills You

It’s in his dreams that he finally finds her hidden in the rain. She’s so tiny, much smaller than he remembers her being, and cold. She is so very cold. It doesn’t stop Arya Stark from wasting any time in chiding him. Every word that escapes her lips becomes a barb and stings. Gendry is reminded of how low he really is, and all she does is remind him that this is what he chose with the Brotherhood without Banners. He does his best to pay it no mind and use all of his body’s will to reach forward towards the small body of Arya, but she dances swiftly away out of his reach in between the droplets every time. Each move brings her farther and farther way, and deeper into the stench of rotten corpses and dogs. Every time Gendry tries to push ahead through the windswept rain to touch her, she moves one step beyond and five steps above his grasp until she is gone completely. 

The Brotherhood searches for her and each night after he wakes in the dark, half afraid and furious. Gendry would curse the small phantom, and hope that she was just on her way to her brother and mother, like she wanted. He wondered if she had made it to the Twins, or far beyond the call of any of them. He thought himself into a hole in the ground wondering if she made it home, or even if she would understand the concept of it. He wondered if Robb was wrapping her up in his warm arms and telling her she was silly for thinking he would never pay her ransom. The different scenarios he cooked up in his head surpassed the last in absurdity until he decided to stop thinking about it at all.

Days turn into weeks and there was nothing in life but the forge. Sometimes he would see her again in her dreams, but there were times where he would work at the Smithy and remember Harrenhal with the small girl with a flayed man upon her breast. There are times where Gendry thinks that if he turns and catches her at the right time she’ll just be there behind him, like always, just watching him work. Now when he opens his eyes, or looks out where no one ever wants to, she isn’t there. It’s only him and the ache in his chest. He misses the angry scowl, and part of him even missed her throwing fruit at his head. There was something else that Gendry couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it mattered none now. For a short while he would just be at peace with him and the metal he shaped before him.

It wasn’t long until the nightmares finally found their way. He saw Arya dressed in fear and blood. He couldn’t believe that she could even appear even smaller than she was before, shaking like a leaf covered in a sticky substance that hide her face from him. It doesn’t hide her eyes. “It should have been you.” She whispers full of sorrow. This was Arry, Weasel, or whatever name she came up with. Arya Stark was never filled with sorrow, she would fight until the bitter end, but before him now she was broken. Here she was another lost child to the war, and all she could say was, “you should have stayed. It should have been you.”

Gendry wakes screaming. 

A few days later a raven arrives from one of the informants in Riverrun, Gendry is told. With the dark bird comes tales of a wedding seated in the deepest of reds filled with betrayal and murder. A slaughter they called it. Gendry had pretended to not hear the news while Beric and the Brotherhood would plan to go over what the implications meant. Gendry excuses himself from dinner that night and heads towards the Smithy. Lem catches why he goes, but doesn’t say a word. It takes all his strength to make it to the doors, but he vomits to the side of the building. His insides feel like they are burning. Gendry had become no stranger to the drink, but this was an entirely different pain. It never felt this bad. The King in the North, Catelyn Tully, and all the Stark’s horses and men couldn’t put themselves back together again. His head repeats the words over and over: betrayed, murdered, by the Freys. Gendry refuses to believe that Arya could even be among them in all his bull-headed stubbornness. Arya would have gotten away. Arya would have thought of something. Then the skull-splitting thought finally sinks in, the truth he had been fighting since he left the inn. Arya was still only a girl of one and ten. She was still a child in a world where men took what they pleased and burned the rest. She might have been the most useful person he knew but what was to stop a man twice her size with a knife.

For a while rest never seemed to find him, and Lem would grow concerned. Lem would tell him he couldn’t leave him alone about his love of the wolf princess, no matter how hard Gendry would argue with him. Lem would try to console him with wine, woman, or sometime a combination of the both. He would grumble and the women would think something was wrong with him. Arya was most likely the princess of carrions and no amount of wine could dull that ache. “Shouldn’t have let her go.” Gendry would say to whatever wine he was speaking to that night. After a while most people just left him alone in his anger.

“Of course you shouldn’t have.” She answers him that evening. Arya swirls around him like a vision clad in achingly beautiful white and silver fur robes. The small clasp of house stark rests atop her breast where once a flayed man laid. The mouth of the wolf drips with blood. Her appearance is slightly different than the boy-girl he had become acquainted with. Her hair is longer and Arya looks even more like a proper girl than she did at Acorn Hall. In his dream he tells her things he wouldn’t have in life, some things that a maid of one and ten wouldn’t understand. Perhaps, he prayed, this phantom would, but Arya only smiles knowingly and plays with the leather and chain on his torso while he speaks every now and then laughing in a way that makes wherever they are brighter.

Gendry doesn’t hesitate here, and he kisses her forehead feeling that it will all end very shortly, and he wonders where it is the wolves of the north go when they die.

That morning Gendry wants to ask Thoros where the Lord of the Light brings those who die, but he never really gets a chance to. There is quite the commotion as the Brotherhood returns. They have returned without the lightening lord, and in his stead is Lady Stoneheart. Beric had finally left them in the afterlife. Gendry never really gets a good look at the woman in charge now, but when she walks by in her dark robes he feels the warmth of the earth leave. Her priorities are not that of that of Ser Beric. There is a deep seated thirst for vengeance against the Freys, and Gendry can’t help but want to kill them all. 

In time Gendry listens very closely to the talk about what has become known as the Red Wedding, and there is one word that remains unspoken and in that he finds comfort.

There is another thing that begins to plague his thoughts and dreams and that’s Jeyne. Plain Jeyne, good Jeyne, and when she visits his dreams they are confusing, but it never really matters there always seems to be a little nymph staying just out of his reach. He doesn’t always see her but a glimpse, or a lingering scent of Acorn Hall and he can’t focus on the girl in front of him who clearly wants him. He pays it no more mind when the two of them begin to care for the wayward children that come through, the little orphans of the war that have nowhere else to go. Jeyne insists that the two of them take care of the children, and she insinuates more, but Gendry is doing this because he feels it’s what a knight ought to do. In all his anger, rage, and confusion this is the one thing that seems to ring true. With Jeyne it’s about taking care of the children, and he doesn’t want to ring her bell.

Time flows like a river and travelers pass through the inn. Most of them are people that Gendry doesn’t know, or care to know. There is a woman who comes to the Inn. She is tall, taller than some of the men he has seen in his time. She carries a sword, and seems more of a hero than most of the knights he has known. Gendry thinks of Arya for the first time in a long time, and how she would have loved her. He follows R’hllor now, and he wonders what she would think of that. Arya would probably call him stupid, but he has seen that Red Priest do things that no man should, no man ought to. This woman’s determination to find her ‘sister’ reminds him of his lost lady, the one who wanted nothing more to go home. It was reason enough to protector her from Biter when the time came. Gendry had stopped him from killing the poor woman, but it did not stop the Brotherhood from bringing her to Stoneheart. He did what he thought Arya would do. Save her as much as he can, after the screams die out in the distance he dreams of the little wolf once more.

Gendry doesn’t recognize her at first, but his body is fully alert the minute he realizes he is dreaming. She is sitting near a weirwood, clad in a white fur cloak, and the silver robes. She looks so soft to the touch. Her hair is longer but when she turns to face him there is a mask of black and white. He moves closer but this time the young girl doesn’t move a muscle. He stands in front of her and she doesn’t run away. She stands steadfast and sad. Gendry reaches forward and touches the mask, it feels like a carefully crafted steel piece that begins to fade away in the air like bits of paper, and what he sees beneath startles him. Arya’s eyes are a milky white and unlike before she stares right into him. She sees everything that is under the surface, everything he has tried so desperately to hide, and everything that keeps bringing her back. “You’re dead.” He states to the phantom before him.

“Am not.” Arya speaks pointedly. “Stupid.”

He crinkles his forehead. “You ran-“

“And I would have come back. I always come back, like you did.” Arya then adds with a hint of sadness. “Even if you were going to leave me anyway, Gendry. You could have smithed for my brother, you know.”

“He’s dead, m’lady.” Gendry tells her.

“The king of mutton and broken courtesies,” Her voice is so far away, “a king of nothing.”

“M’lady,” He says trying to touch her. He always seems to want to touch her. He wants to quench himself in her, in the essence of her, until everything else is burned away and forgotten. All the guilt he feels that is eating away in his chest.

“If I’m a lady then you’re the bloody king, bastard boy.” Arya wolfishly grins, and Gendry is able to touch her for the first time. Her small face is unnaturally soft as he plays with her cheek, brushing a stray piece of hair out of it. She feels like feathers, childhood memories, and broken dreams. She is the ecstasy of first love, and the pain of loss. In his left hand he feels the smith hammer weighing him down, comfortable and familiar. It was always the easy choice. He raises the hammer and brings it down upon her. Arya Stark doesn’t even flinch as she looks right into him.

Gendry wakes covered in sweat in his cot. He is safe in the storage room of the Smithy. He takes deep breaths and he swears he can still smell her nearby. He closes his eyes and he remembers the softness of her skin, the milk in her eye, and her words.

“If you’d been my lady…” Gendry sighs and finally knows deep inside what everyone else has seemed to have known from the first moment he set eyes on her. He coughs and looks around the place he has chosen to call him. “Stupid bastard.”


End file.
